Comments on: China Unveils the Fastest Supercomputer in the World. Should We Panic?

By: David Hasselhof

David Hasselhof — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:24:05 +0000

Excellent work over again! Thanks a lot=)

By: fatkid

fatkid — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:31:54 +0000

IBM made a nifty computer for the Germans in World War II, at the time it was a state of the art counting machine.. Cray took a hiatus between his great projects for US, I hope it took that long in the shower for him to feel clean about their applications. China? Sure, that abacus won’t be counting roses, especially since we mowed the trail for them to follow.

By: Hanusz Kowalik

Hanusz Kowalik — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 01:55:19 +0000

China has assembled the fastest computer but has not manufactured all components.
The greatest peoblem that USA faces is making engineering and computer science professions attractive for young people.Only American talented young people will secure the American leadership in computing and related technologies. Having the fastest machine is not enough. We need strong
science programs at schools , attractive related career opportunities and general public admiration for sciences and technological progress.

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 20:41:13 +0000

@ Darius-
Yes thank you!

And C’mon 80 Beats, “Should We Panic?” is the biggest sensationalist headline I’ve seen on this site…Even your argument for “no” is based on the fact that “it is not completely of Chinese origin.”

How about no, because its not even an issue. Why do we have to be #1 in everything? We should be panicking because we have one of the highest poverty rates in the industrialized world. Or because our citizens don’t have humane healthcare. Or because we’re fighting three unnecessary wars.

By: Eric

Eric — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 06:03:07 +0000

China better get started on the successor because America is right on their tail.

The IBM Blue Gene/Q (aka Sequoia) has a maximum throughput of 20 PetaFLOPS and
it will come online at the NNSA in 2012!

- the fastest supercomputer ever built(faster than the Top500 combined)
- latest technologies including optical fiber interconnects and switches
- unprecedented efficiency capable of performing at 3000 MFLOPS/Watt
- capable of running a wider variety of applications because it is not limited by GPUs like the Tianhe-1A

Lets see China beat that. It is things like these that make me proud of America as much as I despise nationalism.

By: kirk

kirk — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 21:49:12 +0000

yo Thomas… your brain is not directly involved in the local decision of the finger/hand/arm/shoulder response to a hot surface. And this is a fairly slow distributed computing anyway. Your iPhone is faster than your finger/hand/arm response to pain. You should ask your biology teacher about biology and leave Laplace transforms for the math instructor.

By: thinker

thinker — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 00:05:12 +0000

People are missing an important fact – slapping together a million CPUs / GPUs does not make a supercomputer, just a power hungry cluster good only for easily parallel or unrelated tasks (capacity computing). It is the interconnect that makes that a “supercomputer” – and the Chinese have a custom interconnect that’s made the difference to their LINPACK Rmax numbers.

By: thomas

thomas — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 22:22:51 +0000

from what my math teacher tells me the time it takes your brain to register your finger on a hot stove and remove that finger because its HOT!!!! is faster than any supercomputer could ever hope to be! so we all have a supercomputer faster than chinas!!

By: Brian Too

Brian Too — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:10:58 +0000

Building advanced supercomputers is actually not that difficult these days. There is a recipe for how to build them and everyone knows it. Just like computers themselves, supercomputers are something of a commodity. The days of specialty computing companies, specialty processors, specialty hardware and even specialty software(*), is over.

For instance, everyone knows and says that computers are better every year. Now step back and take a big picture look. Yes, many of the details have changed, and the components are individually much better than years past. However the list of components at a high level, has not changed in 25 years. Maybe more!

The best description of high end stereos I ever heard applies 100% to computers too, including supercomputers. When you get the best there’s an unease. You know that someone is going to come out with a better one and then you won’t have bragging rights for being the best.

The downside is that it is extremely difficult to maintain leadership at all times. The upside is that you can always regain the title, even if it is for relatively short (or even long) intervals.

(*) OK, this is a bit premature, but it is coming. All modern supercomputers are massively parallel architectures. This is slowly coming true even for ordinary PC’s and the industry forecasts commodity PC CPU’s containing hundreds of cores in the intermediate future. Therefore even humble PC software is going to adopt supercomputer software practices. In the process there is a very reasonable liklihood that PC software will eventually influence supercomputer software as well (bigger developer base, more money, more software, all equals a more dynamic software marketplace).

By: Darius

Darius — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 19:27:12 +0000

That’s Americans for you. Tell them someone built a better computer and they gotta have an even better one at the cost of billions of dollars. Tell them that their health care system is crumbling and there are countries with far better healthcare… and they don’t care. Go figure.